From the conclusion of The Domain of Strategic Management: History and Evolution, in Handbook of Strategy and Management (Bowman, Singh, Thomas):
A set of limitations that have caused concern for several writers is the tendency within the field to invent new terms to label a construct even in instances where existing terms may work well. A related concern is with a lack of attention to prior treatments of a topic and a lack of reconciliation between new terms used by an author with those that already exist in the literature. A consequence of this proliferation of terms is a reduction in the extent to which research is cumulative, because prior and later work cannot be compared effectively. However, as increasing numbers of authors are aware of these limitatoins, there is greater and greater comparability of research across studies, resulting in a cumulative body of knowledge in the field.
In other words, researchers keep giving new labels to old ideas. This is one reason why theoreticians and practitioners have widely differing views on the value of academic research on strategy. To my knowledge, this is a problem unique to management research in general and strategy research in particular; I believe that other social sciences are able to agree on names for their constructs, to say nothing of hard sciences where this problem is rarely encountered. It would be interesting to figure out why this difference exists at all...
6:02:50 PM 
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